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January 26, 2006
Cold, cold, cold
Another article about a contentious situation in the BBC News concerns how they're freezing in Georgia. Russian authorities maintain that the explosions damaging natural gas lines were perpetrated by terrorists. Georgia's president has another view, expressed in an earlier article:
Mr Saakashvili said the gas pipeline was blown up in "an area fully under Russian control... with a heavy presence of Russian border guards", where there were no local insurgents."They happened at the same time, and basically they didn't affect supplies to Russia proper, so we can conclude that it was a very well-organised and very well-co-ordinated act.
"We've received numerous threats by Russian politicians and officials at different levels to punish us for basically for not giving them pipelines," the Georgian president said.
Not so far away, the Ukrainian government got a vote of no confidence after partially caving in to price hikes for Russian gas. Russian gas producers had cut the Ukraine off for 3 days in the dead of winter to soften up the negotiations.
This all happened after gas prices were doubled, "As part of a series of recent price hikes for former Soviet countries." I'm writing this from the comfort of my (Russian?) natural gas heated home, where it's only a bit below freezing outside.
Posted by Mark at January 26, 2006 09:18 PM
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